She looks at her life now, with the anticipation of all the adventures that lie ahead, weighed down by just a couple of sadnesses. One, she says, that there is no man in her life; and, two, that there is no bobsled in her life.
Arthur, the trusty sled she piloted to that extraordinary runaway Olympic triumph in Vancouver at 80mph-plus, is no more. “He’s languishing in pieces today. Now I don’t have a sled at all. They [the governing body, British Skeleton] asked for it back. Some bits of Arthur are my own, like the runners and the specially fitted saddle. I’ve got my Olympic belly pan, the bit which is closest to the ice, up on my wall. But the actual sled, the workings of it, the Skeleton federation wanted.
“But nobody’s been using him. To be honest, he’s old now, a prototype sled that wouldn’t win many races now.” So why can’t you get him back in one piece? “Tell me about it! I’d even pay for it. It’s just sad not to have my own sled so that when someone says ‘hey we want to do a feature or a show, like the new Channel 4 series The Jump’, I’d have been able to do it on a sled that I know.”
It feels weird to her. A retired swimming or athletics champion can still pop to her local pool or track but what do you do if you are an ex-slider who just covets the pleasure of reliving the experience that once daily dominated your life?
“I just feel sad when I don’t have the opportunity to slide. I suppose that’s the unique thing in our sport; when you retire, you have to accept ‘that’s it, I may not be able to slide again’. I’ve never been back down in the 20 months since I retired and that is very hard when you’ve spent most of your adult life doing it.
“Of course, it’s an expensive world now, maybe £5,000 to £10,000 to make a sled now. I don’t know what the answer would be if I said now ‘hey, can I get one built up and made for me again and I’ll pay for it?’ Such is the hi-tech and secrecy around developments now, with even McLaren involved, it seems pretty unlikely.”
She misses it because, despite plunging into all sorts of post-career action woman antics, like appearing in adventure and survival TV programmes, nothing, she reckons, has ever quite rekindled the thrill of Olympic sledding.
The nearest experience, she says, was her recent foray into rallying when she was Tony Jardine’s co-driver in the Wales Rally GB, tasting victory in their class. Next time, she reckoned, she would love to be given enough tutoring to be in the driver’s seat itself because she remains hooked by a challenge.
“It’s an amazing feeling knowing my name is in the history books. That’s ‘wow’ but the Olympic victory is only something that will define one chapter of my life, not the whole story. I guess when you talk to champion athletes who went on to become a mother, then their Olympics disappeared into insignificance.”
In Williams’s perfect world, she would now have been married to Slovakian sledder Petr Narovec, the long-standing boyfriend with whom she shared her triumph in Vancouver.
“I would have walked down the aisle with him; he was the love of my life but, ultimately, there’s no hard feelings between us,” she says, sounding genuinely sad. “We split up on Valentine’s Day a year after the Games. It was ’hug, kiss, love you’ but we needed to split up. It was complicated; he has a son and knew I wouldn’t have gone to Prague so he had to choose between his life being a dad to his boy there or moving to the UK to have a life here.”
Subsequently, Williams went out with England rugby World Cup winner Josh Lewsey but that did not work out either. “There’s no man now. I wish I could tell you there was. Where are they?” she laughs, and you can swear you can foresee a queue forming at her doorstep in Bath.
“Obviously, I’d love to find someone to go through the next chapter of my life with but, hey what will be will be. You never know what’s round the corner.”
Williams’s immediate next turn will see her in Sochi this week, trying to do her inspirational bit as a sounding board for Team GB athletes.
“I know a lot of them now and feel like a kind of big sister,” she says. “On Twitter, some end up direct messaging me and pouring their hearts out. I think they see me as one of them, someone who’s been there, who’s known the joy of winning a medal in my first Games but also who understands an athlete’s pain, having not been selected for Turin in 2006.”
She is also confidant – and landlady in Bath – to Lizzy Yarnold, the World Cup skeleton champion she desperately wants to see emulate her in Sochi and, hopefully, enjoy the experience of being a golden Olympian as much as she has.
“It has been a wonderful experience. It opens doors, doesn’t it,” smiles Williams. What, to a new sled? Or a new romance? Or the chance to be “the first female Bear Grylls”? She laughs that anything is possible but admits that, just for an instant up at Sochi’s Sanki Sliding Centre, there will be one last pang of regret.
“Just wanting to be on that sled and competing myself,” she sighs. “There’ll be part of my heart dying.”
